How people spend their time matters for quality of life, irrespective of the income generated, as economists and even governments have begun to grasp. An indication of this was when former French president Nicolas Sarkozy set up the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress to explore the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress. It concluded that “the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.”1 Chaired by Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, the commission highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of financial resources alone. This is part of a wider recognition in economics that people do not necessarily become happier when they become richer.2
In a similar but more philosophical vein, Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom sets out to change our thinking about what makes for quality of life. According to the authors, how much time we have matters just as much as how much money we have. The book’s argument is built around one powerful idea, that being able to choose how you spend your time is central to an individual’s sense of freedom:
When we say that someone “has more time” than someone else, we do not mean that she has literally a twenty-fifth hour in her day. Rather, we mean to say that she has fewer constraints and more choices in how she can choose to spend her time. She has more “autonomous control” over her time. “Temporal autonomy” is a matter of having “discretionary” control over your time.3
Conversely, the less you are able to determine how your time is spent, the more your being is “unfree,” or deprived. The concept of discretionary time as a measure of freedom is very appealing. It echoes earlier ideas about the desire for temporal sovereignty, or control over one’s time, as a significant measure of life satisfaction and well-being.4 Such notions support normative arguments that treat the allocation and availability of time as important dimensions of social justice and of legitimate political concern. Instead of focusing on speed, per se, to further our exploration of the acceleration society, we should be looking at changing dynamics in the distribution of time.
Chapter three
62